Washington Post reporting that Nancy Pelosi has told House Democrats that she believes that Biden will be convinced to exit the race soon.

hmmmmm the RNC has been called the "Grindr Superbowl" and got used so much there it crashed the app. Didn't see that coming.

Seeing reports he is gonna drop out this weekend.

If he's going to do it, they should leak it tonight and say "Joe Biden is scheduling a statement from the White House on this date". The speculation alone will overshadow the RNC.

In case anyone is still looking for something anti-Trump from NYT

Donald Trump Is Unfit to Lead https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/...-android-share

Wow. If that actually happens, this is going to get insane.

Tester has now called for him to drop.

It's over.

Sweet jesus Hogan was maximum cringe. Why.

A guy just out of jail, a professional wrestler, a porn star, his defense attorney...

It sure isn't the GOP of the nineties.

Local Fox News just said Biden is expected to make a major announcement shortly after the RNC ends - I guess that means tonight? Odd not to get any kind of alert to that effect. Just a matter of fact statement following an interview of one of the reporter's friends who lives in Butler and attended the rally/shooting.

Trying to get Melania there?

.

It feels like both sides want to lose.

My child is watching the clip for the sheer comedy.
I'm wondering if there's some nation I could buy citizenship to.

He’s been getting major negative messages from his allies. Not sure what the announcement will be but would not be surprised if he drops out.

He reminds me of (great) grandpa who insists he can still drive. Okay, maybe not to the same degree but it’s time …

You can. I've considered it if your boy wins.

It reminds me of a situation where a few relatives say the grandpa can't drive all of a sudden when they were fine with it until recently, even though it's been clear for a while there was a problem.

Or like a trope on some of the West Wing episodes, where they pontificate on wanting to talk to the respondents of a poll who think foreign aid is too high and simultaneously don't want it reduced.

Another incident of democrats attacking other democrats...
Tenacious D had a concert and they threw Kyle Gass a birthday party on stage with a cake. Jack Black said "make a wish" and Kyle replied "don't miss Trump next time". As a result everyone is attacking Gass. Jack cancelled the rest of the tour.

I mean...who WASN'T thinking that.

Why don't they just switch the ticket to Harris/Biden. NO one cares about the vp anyway. He can do all the work and have all the naps he wants....altho wait...biden loves making deals. he might not actually cast the deciding vote in congress during the 50/50.

another hot take....Michelle Obama bows to the pressure and wants to avoid another trumpland and runs as Obama/Harris

gah....why7 do they write articles like this....it just makes Dems look SO BAd

SERIOUSLY STOP writing articles that someone is GOING to do something

It's weird that the people in the party making the most noise about him dropping out are the ones that are his age. Most of the youngins are either in support of Biden or quiet.

This is as far from a hot take as you can get. It’s been discussed at length by the talking heads and right wing conspiracists forever. While it would be great to see their heads explode she’s stated several times she has zero interest.

Because they don’t want to run now. They wanna let Trump burn the country then fundraise off it for a 28-32 run.

Hindsight is 20-20, most conceded there was some decline, but how much? And then all of a sudden there was Adm Stockdale moment. The debate did matter (this time) after all.

Watch this from 3.5 years ago and tell me you can't see a difference. At this age, things can change gradually sometimes, and then others times there can be major jarring jumps. The fact that he seems to have been shielded from people a good bit the last year seems to suggest a little of both.

This was President Biden just 3.5 years ago.

When I posted this in my IG stories three weeks ago I even had former Biden and Obama staffers direct messaging me in shock at the difference. pic.twitter.com/kJE1qXlOQy

— Yashar Ali 🐘 (@yashar) July 18, 2024

Tonight has been a journey for us all pic.twitter.com/RadtqcWtWm

— David Folkenflik (@davidfolkenflik) July 19, 2024

I didn't watch the speech but Trump definitely will not be able to maintain boring unity speeches. His base will demand red meat and if it is one thing he is good at it is reading the room and giving the base what they want.

Why is Trump obsessed with Hannibal Lecter?

It seems after last night that Mike Judge was way too conservative with his Idiocracy timeline

It's so strange. No announcement of any kind happened. The way it was an after-thought news item (from a local Fox affiliate during the 10pm news) combined with the lack of other "breaking news" alerts made me think it wasn't real. I have no idea what they were talking about. Maybe that was part of a previous news item that wasn't verified and they never took off the teleprompter?

So the announcement this morning appears to be that Biden is going campaigning.

Whoopie.

I don't think it was an Adm Stockdale moment, but in terms of how much, a majority of Americans and a third of Democrats were saying he would have 'severe' problems handling the responsibilities of a second term at least as far back as last fall, consistently. I do not buy for a second the 'oh, we didn't know it was like this' stuff. People knew.

This is not about Biden's incapacity or whatever. This is about not thinking he can win. It's a 'Hail Mary' to try to fix that which I hope doesn't blow up but I think it has a very sizable chance of doing so if Biden does in fact drop out (I don't care how many people think that's foregone, I'll believe it when I see it). It doesn't appear there was a major shift in polling after the debate. The states that Trump is ahead in now, he was ahead in before in almost all cases.


There's definitely a difference from 2020. A difference that was mostly well-known, and people still overwhelmingly chose him in the primary being well aware of it.

"There's definitely a difference from 2020. A difference that was mostly well-known, and people still overwhelmingly chose him in the primary being well aware of it."

No they weren't because most people don't pay that much attention. Most people probably still thought Biden was the 2020 version until he ambled on to that debate stage. And they chose him without being given a legitimate choice. There wasn't a competitive primary, and he did almost no campaigning.

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While Biden's campaign workers still seem defiant, two more Senators and half a dozen new House members call for him step aside.

It's the same thing though? Again, there was a sizable amount of concern about his ability to do the job going back well into last year (and I'm being conservative here). People had the opportunity to demand another candidate. I think you're basically right on people not paying that much attention, that's just voters in general, but that's part of the point; you get the government you deserve. Don't care enough to be informed? Tough tiddlywinks, you get the results of that apathy. I have no sympathy for anyone who thought Biden 2024 would be Biden 2020. There weren't *that* many people who watched the debate, and frankly anyone who takes that approach is just being idiotic, full stop. Even if you hadn't seen Biden do anything in the previous four years, the idea that someone would not be as capable at 81 as they are at 77 is a 'sun rises in the east' level observation.

Just take the poll results mentioned earlier. A third of Democrats expected him to have severe problems. They chose not to make a serious effort to nominate someone else or convince Biden not to run, right up until the point where it looked like he probably wouldn't win. This is even assuming that indepedents are completely irrelevant, which they aren't. There's no getting around that.

There was a sizable amount of people (including me) that was concerned about his age 4 years ago. Almost as many people vote against him in that primary than voted for him. They fell in line when he became the candidate largely because he was better than Trump, and by his own words he was just a "placeholder for the next generation." There was general disappointment when he choose to run again, but his people and party leadership shut down any attempt at an opposing primary run because, as JPhillips has said many times, "a primary challenge to an incumbent makes him look weak and the incumbent tends to lose." Because of that, the public got a limited exposure to the president, a very choreographed and selective view of him. To pretend that this was some well thought out choice and not something the voters where back into is disingenuous.




There are scales to anything. I service a man who is 94 years old. Still drives, still lives at home. He jogs daily. He is still very sharp and spry, heck better than many people half his age. I see him regularly, can I say he is as sharp as he was 5 years ago when I first met him? Idk. He probably isn't, but I couldn't give you a quantifiable answer. How people age and when they fall off is a person by person determination.

Most people would have said pre-debate he probably wasn't as sharp as he was 4 years ago. But the idea that people that have very limited view of him outside of what the White House wanted you to see would be able to make a definitive determination about his capabilities is in your words "idiotic."

More than a third of Democrats didn't vote for him the primaries 4 years ago. The people that makes these type of decisions are not the rank and file. I have no problem castigating the Democratic leadership for this failure and allowing this situation to happen, but blaming the average voter who has their own lives to deal with for it is preposterous.

That wasn't a real primary, come on.

It wasn't a real primary because almost nobody wanted one. If a real primary was demanded, it would have happened.


That's exactly backwards. I think blaming the Democratic leadership is what is preposterous. The 'having their own lives to deal with' bit ... I mean, voting citizenship is a responsibility. Government by the people, at a basic level, requires citizens who inform themselves and handle their lives at the same time. This degree of going out of our way to make excuses for the people who have the power is just an exercise in gross blame-shifting IMO. This isn't disingenuous, as you falsely alleged. It's a basic fact.

Party leadership cannot stop a candidate who the people want from being nominated. They can tip the scales in the case it being fairly even, but that's it.

The rules to who gets on a ballot, how they get on a ballot, and the attention they get is in leaderships hands.

In most cases, candidates have to make an appeal to voters to be available to be "chosen." Voters are mostly passive creatures who choose among the available options. It's more accurate to state that, whether it was Biden or the DNC or other party elderstatesmen/women, no one who was on a list of potential candidates made any kind of serious move to challenge him. And that's what it would have been - a challenge.

Seems stupid in hindsight, but to point to the primary as if voters are moving the chess pieces and politicans are just the pawns is a ridiculous take. They voted for Biden because the party - either forced by Biden or its own complicity - made clear he was going to be the nominee.

Think about what's being said here.

We need to defeat Trump to save democracy. Also, no of course people don't have the power to choose their own nominees, why would that be a thing? They just have to meekly do what the party tells them to.

At what point does the cognitive dissonance of all this not make one's head explode? Or is this 'democracy' that we are trying to save an Orwellian system that is Of the Party, By the Party, and For the Party?


Politicians aren't pawns, but if the people demand other options they will get them. The party absolutely cannot make clear who is going to be the nominee. The only way they get away with that is if people tolerate it. If they want another option, politicians will step up and give it to them.

Any of the elected Democrats now saying Biden should step down could have called for a different candidate. People could have lobbied their representatives at any level. They could have urged their own senators/governors to run. They could have done any number of things that they chose not to do. They aren't just helpless bystanders in this process, they have the power. When you choose not to exercise it, that's not the fault of the party who you delegated that authority to of your own free will. It's the fault of the electorate, period.

People did once they knew there was a problem. The idea we all were personally interviewing the president daily and assessing his mental acuity is again ridiculous.

It also takes a lot longer for him to gingerly creep up the stairs on Air Force One (while clamping on to the hand rail for dear life) than it did 4 years ago. And he's totally abandoned that awkward jog he used to break into for a few paces to show everyone how vigorous he still was while he was shuffling along.

The writing is on the wall. It's essentially a vote of no confidence by your followers. The more that voice, the worse it will be when he greedily stays in.

Vance's plan to give parents extra votes for each kid is unworkable and dumb, so perfect for today's GOP.

It's a superficial issue to get people angry. So yeah, perfect for the Fox News crowd. They have no interest in a deep dive into why many younger people today are choosing to be child free.

We need a Padmé

Someone put a mic in front of Natalie Portman and have her call for a vote of nonconfidence

My understanding is this is a corollary to his belief that people who don't have kids (namely, gays and Godless liberal women who don't view themselves as child factories) therefore don't have "skin in our democracy" and should no longer be able to vote. So this is the dilution of their vote since you can't run for VP directly arguing to take voting rights away from people.

Did he specify people who have their own children, because I believe previously he threw "step-parents" into the pot with gays?

Until they find out how many kids an inner city woman can have


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I mean, if you WANT the Empire, then sure!

There were like 11 states that didn't even hold a primary. Another state was told their results wouldn't count because they refused to change the date of it. There wasn't any scheduled debates which would have been helpful in determining Biden's mental status. And anyone who dared step up to challenge was inundated by lawsuits, threats, and blacklisted from the party.

Pretending this was some open primary that the party was holding and giving everyone a fair shot is just a fallacy. The party decided that Biden would be the nominee and didn't want anyone else standing in his way.

When people vote for another option (3rd party candidate) as you suggest, liberals cry about how that candidate stole their vote and helped Trump.


Biden folks run the DNC and were making it clear they would destroy the political prospects of anyone who dared speak up. Even if it hurt the party.

Just a moment...

I think people were cowardly for not speaking up, but the party has been very clear that you can't cross them when they want something. This of course excludes Sinema, Manchin, and others who blocked policies because Dems don't really give a shit about that stuff.

How many votes do you get if you fuck gloves in between couch cushions

Although the media is focused on Biden's age in terms of being infirm and incapable I think that also obscures that the voters (myself included) see many attractive points to Biden stepping down.


One is simply change, we're all tired of seeing the same old politicians getting trotted our and as long as the possibility of replacement remains out there but is undefined, you can imagine all sorts of best case scenarios for yourself. I would be remiss to not mention this is exactly what appeals to MAGA voters too.



Secondarily I think there's a massive amount of voters who would like to see the boomers finally transfer power to the other generations. This is along the lines of age and change, but more specific. Harris is still technically a boomer, but like the above, as long as that option remains undefined we can still pretend some young up and comer will step in.


I think there's a lot of voters that would take that change and transfer of generational power even if it comes at the cost of a lost election (I dunno if I count myself in this group), because it would finally signal a foundational shift that has been long overdue.

They could only count black kids at a reduced rate... say three fifths?

Kamala Harris is also a baby boomer, I believe. Like on the very very end of it. Biden isn’t even a boomer.

WSJ, breaking: “The gunman who tried to kill Donald Trump was able to fly a drone and get aerial footage of the western Pennsylvania fairgrounds shortly before the former president was set to speak there, law-enforcement officials briefed on the matter said, further underscoring…

— Josh Kraushaar (@JoshKraushaar) July 19, 2024

Not meant for you, but for anybody else they might not know about ChatGPT.

“During the Constitutional Convention, a major point of contention between Northern and Southern states was how to count the enslaved population. Southern states wanted enslaved individuals to be fully counted to boost their representation in the House of Representatives, while Northern states, where slavery was less prevalent, opposed this since it would give the South more political power.”

Well, I guess we could also say that the boomers want to see "The Silent Generation" finally transfer power to the other generations. Biden is so old that he doesn't even make the cut as a boomer. First elected to congress when Richard Nixon was president.

Biden was there to greet Lewis and Clark when they returned from their journey.

She is a boomer technically...which I did mention in my post, but as you and Vic mentioned it is crazy that Biden isn't even young enough to be a boomer. Dude was alive when they bombed Pearl Harbor.

why is this country so agist...

C'mon CF.... this ain't like pushing the 55yr of from the company of 20 years to make way for the younger, cheaper, "better" employee.

Pete getting ready for those VP debates...

Uhh Pete Buttigieg just destroyed JD Vance on @RealTimers pic.twitter.com/EFQnasWRJh

— chyea ok (@chyeaok) July 20, 2024

I didn’t get a sense for anything like that during Biden’s presidency (until he trounced himself at the debate). While the concept of younger people like GWB and Obama running isn’t new, this hasn’t been the case lately. Just a few months ago the country voted overwhelmingly for Biden and Trump to run for office. The country is definitely concerned about Biden’s cognitive decline, not his age. If he still had his wits (more consistently) about him, this would never have come up.

Grindr Dating App Crashes in Milwaukee During RNC: Everything We Know

So the Trump campaign is now saying that for the past week a guy who has let his medical license expire and was demoted by the Navy, has been in charge of Trump's care.

Good ol' Ronny Johnson

Honestly thats better than me. I just ask my friend George how I look. He said I looked I looked fine. At least George gives me a minimal fee.

The guy telling us Biden is sharp, energetic, and acts 25 years younger than he is has an up to date license. So there’s that.

So in other words, if you pay someone enough money, they'll say whatever you want them to say.

Aaron Sorkin suggesting Dems nominate Romney is the new dumbest thing in print.

I mean it would make sense for the Centrist DNC

No.

Romney wouldn't run as a Dem and Dems wouldn't vote for him.

Also, it's amazing that we're all just numb to Trump's statement that Elon has to be taken care of because he's giving him 45 mil a month. Not only is that staggeringly corrupt, but he's basically admitting a crime as PACs aren't supposed to coordinate with candidates.

I was coming here to post this. That makes about as much sense as Liz Cheney. Just because they haven't bent the knee to Trump doesn't mean their political positions are palatable to Democrats.

This is more or less how I would expect Vance to reply.

And there it is. Biden drops out.

Anyone know if The Rock is a democrat?

I still think they should go with Taylor Swift

She couldn’t handle Kanye. Trump would eat her alive. Anyway it’s 2024. It’s a man’s world.

And the candidate who actually cares about the country makes the best choice for the country.

Thank you Joe.

The Rock has started playing footsie with Trump recently.

That would be a guaranteed win, but the Democrats are too dumb to do it.

I think it is a mistake. But maybe there’s something I don’t know.

But it wouldn't be nothing, nothing without a woman or a girl

Make no mistake on who has orchestrated this for the past week...

Nancy Pelosi is the most important Democratic politician of my lifetime and it’s not close

— dylan matthews �� (@dylanmatt) July 21, 2024

Biden endorses Harris, no shock there.

Cuban's reaction:

Father time is undefeated

— Mark Cuban (@mcuban) July 21, 2024

Man, I thought it was inevitable with the media coverage, and yet it I am still shocked.

It was a no win situation for Joe, but I also feel like being weak enough to submit to the pressure only confirms that he should have dropped out long ago. He and his crew put up a little fight, but if he were truly as capable as he was 4 years then he wouldn't have given up, regardless of the pressure.

America is fucked

Biden could have joined RBG in history as failing to see just how important their horrible decisions had been in ruining the leadership of this country. Thankfully, he made the right call. Good for everyone across the board.

Biden couldn’t win. The narrative was written 3 minutes into the debate.

There was actually some question. There were rumors he would stay neutral and allow an open nomination process. There have been Democrat think tanks floating different process ideas.



Pushing Harris is at least cleaner, and the fact she can more vigorously campaign is a plus. She still has her negatives that might play out as not as much a bump as the party might hope.

Biden made the right decision and one that will be remembered as so. He's endorsed Kamala so she can run on continuing Biden's progress but also running as a change candidate vs Trump. Hopefully she can get back some of the young voters, minorities, women and independents that had abandoned Biden because he was too old.

I still am holding out hope for Pete. He's hardly any kind of progressive, but he's a killer in the media, and I could be convinced that's all that matters. Even as VP he'd be a good bulldog.

I think he'd be a better VP option this year. Shapiro, Beshear, or Pete is who I'm hoping for VP. I've seen talk about Kelly, Walz and Cooper but I think it's better to go with someone younger than Kamala.